Women of Valor (26 page)

The Rochambelles, and most division veterans as well, counted the battle for Grussenheim as their worst experience of the war. It was bitterly cold, with no shelter and no cover, and the Germans held the villages while the Allies held the flat and bare fields of snow.

It did not help that the assignment to take Grussenheim came from de Lattre and his First Army while Leclerc was away, and that the directions on taking it were close to suicidal. Orders were orders.

The Second Division already had had to fight its way back from Lorraine to Strasbourg, where German troops had retaken positions to drive a wedge between Allied forces to the north and the south. The Allied command, looking at its troops thinly drawn along a wide front, prepared to pull a strategic retreat and let Strasbourg fall back into German hands, but de Lattre and French General Alphonse Juin argued fiercely against it. The price was too high.

It took the French army nearly two weeks to oust the Germans from the Strasbourg area. By January 20, the division was moving south for the final sweep: the Colmar Pocket. The Germans had their backs to the Rhine, and were being squeezed into an ever-shrinking area. The result was some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

The Rochambelles were pleased to be back in Alsace, which, despite harsh conditions, they found to be a more pleasant region than Lorraine. Lorraine had become, in division parlance, “Little Siberia.” It was not simply a reference to the weather, but also to their having been sent far from the action by the First Army during the Battle of the Bulge. Now, driving southward into Alsace, the Second Division was one of 12 divisions under de Lattre’s command, including two U.S. armored divisions. Their target was a flat triangle of land bordered on the east by the Rhine, on the south by the Colmar Canal, and on the west by National Route 83. Orders were to come down from a northwest-to-southeast angle, aiming at Neuf-Brisach, and push the Germans back across the Rhine. The Third and the Twenty-eighth U.S. Infantry Divisions were to hold the southern flank, and the French Foreign Legion’s First Division the northern flank.

Various tactical groups stopped along the way at Sélestat, and several Rochambelles were with them. During a lull in the action, Lucie and her partner Tony Rostand decided to go for a walk. A shell landed nearby when they were bent over to peer in a shop window, and they both were hit with a little shrapnel in the rear end. It was an uncomfortable, slightly embarrassing, but not life-threatening, injury. The incident, naturally, turned into another Rochambelle joke about the division punishment for shopping.

At midnight the night of January 25, Commandant Maurice Sarazac was ordered to take two intersections, numbered 177 North and 177 South, on the Departmental Road 45 between Ostheim and Grussenheim. Both were being blocked by German antitank defenses and the 1st Foreign Legion was unable to push any further. Jacotte and Crapette lined up in the convoy behind their friends in the tank
Uskub
and headed east. Division artillery slammed 500 mortars onto the southern intersection, destroying several German antitank cannons, then took the terrain and moved northward to the next intersection. There, the artillery exchanges were intense, and several French tanks were hit.

Jacotte and Crapette transported wounded soldiers to the Guémar hospital, driving through snowdrifts across rocky fields, each jolt and bump putting the injured soldiers in agony. Twice, in trying to get some wounded soldiers out of there, the ambulance was whipped by the nearby pass of a mortar. In Normandy, the Germans had used ambulances for transporting munitions and troops, and apparently figured the Allies would do the same. “It was a very dangerous situation,” Jacotte said. “One of the nurses was killed a little further down the road.”

Convoy of ambulances in the snow, Alsace, January 1945.

They were camped in a small wood, with leafless trees for cover, and the march of mortars followed them no matter how often they moved the ambulance. Snow was falling, the temperature dropping to - 20° C (- 4°F), and the ambulance was full of soldiers trying to warm up. No one slept that night for the artillery and cold. Many soldiers’ feet froze: forty-five men from the Colmar Pocket were hospitalized for frostbitten feet in the last week of January alone. “I have to say the shoes were no good. The unlucky ones who got their feet wet in the snow found their feet frozen,” Jacotte said. While in Paris, she had picked up her old ski boots, made of waterproofed leather, and wore them with two or three pairs of socks. Her feet stayed dry.

Driving back from Guémar one afternoon, they found the road littered with half-tracks and burned-out tanks, and saw a German antitank gun on the edge of the woods turn and start firing at them, missing three times. A couple of soldiers from their unit poked their heads out of the roadside ditch and told them to get the hell out of the car and into the ditch. They jumped down into the snow, freezing wet, while the shells whistled overhead. One missile landed with a flat thud instead of an explosion, and pastel-colored fumes started spewing out. The soldiers were very afraid of poison gas, a legacy of damaged veterans of World War One. The women’s gas masks were in the ambulance: should they risk getting shot to get the mask or risk getting poisoned without it? They decided on the gas and stayed where they were. At dark they managed to slip away and rendezvous with the rest of the group in the wood. Around midnight it started raining mortars again, and two infantrymen from the Ninth Company, known as
La Nueve
because of its many Spanish members, were wounded, one mortally. Captain Raymond Dronne sent a half-track to escort them to the Guémar hospital, but it slid into a ditch, and the women drove on alone. Rather than hazard the route back, they spent the night in a frozen barn on the outskirts of town. They met some American soldiers at Guémar, a couple of guys from Brooklyn and the Bronx, who were shocked to find women on the front lines. The men gave Jacotte cigarettes and chocolate.

The next day the women returned to the wood by the strategic intersection. At night, mortars from battles for villages eastward, particularly Grussenheim, slammed around their bivouac. The temperature hovered at −17°C (−1.4°F) in the day and plunged to −23°C (−9.4°F) at night; snow was in thigh-deep drifts on the ground, and a biting wind swept across the unbroken plain. Soldiers took turns sitting in the ambulances in order not to freeze, and still, every morning, Jacotte and Crapette drove new frostbite cases to the hospital. Next to the heater in the front of the ambulance, it was 8°C (46°F), and in the back it was an even zero (32°F), with ice on the inside walls. It was a miserable, aching cold with no relief. The Rochambelles slept with their boots on to avoid having to thaw them in the morning.

At this point, Danièle had to leave. She was suffering from chronic bronchitis and a scurvy-like gingivitis brought on by a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. She had endured four years of poor nutrition during the occupation, and her bronchitis was instigated and aggravated by the glacial conditions in which they were living. She still had the key to her apartment in her bag. When she unlocked the door in Caen, her mother said, “Who’s that?” Denise Colin also fell ill while working in the Colmar Pocket and was hospitalized with severe bronchitis.

The low and leaden sky precluded air support, and the French were fighting village by village to push the Germans back across the Rhine. At Ebermunster, many soldiers were wounded by mines that bounced up out of the snow and exploded a meter off the ground. The stretcher bearers also were being injured by these deadly mines. Anne-Marie was horrified at the number of bleeding, broken faces she found in the infirmary. “She shouted, pointing at the 50 or so German prisoners, with their hands in the air, who were being held not far from there. ‘What are you waiting for, make them go get the wounded themselves in their minefield!’” Rosette wrote her mother.

Orders came down the line from de Lattre while Leclerc was in Paris. The Third March of Chad Regiment (RMT) and the 501st Tank Regiment were to take Grussenheim in a frontal attack. The Germans held the village with heavy 88mm artillery. The French were two kilometers away, on the other side of the Blind River. There were only a few stands of bare trees on the open, flat terrain between the woods and the village. A light snow was falling, and each side could see the other through their binoculars. Colonel Joseph Putz and his Third RMT fought through the afternoon of January 26 to take control of the river crossing, even though the bridge was long gone. The river was neither large nor deep, but the tanks were having trouble getting across because of ice on the banks. Finally two tanks and a tank destroyer made it, along with the Third Battalion of the Foreign Legion and several RMT companies, which crossed the river in inflatable boats.

Putz was a commander respected for his intelligence and his courage. He had fought in the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War, leading the defense of Bilbao in June 1937. Ernest Hemingway mentioned him by name in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
as a leader to be trusted. But when Putz laid out the plan of attack, de Witasse was not the only captain to question its sanity. Putz shrugged and said orders were orders. He was clearly tense, and the cold was sharpening everyone’s nerves. Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne let officers and soldiers take ninety-minute naps in the back of their ambulance, and that was the only sleep the men were getting. Marie-Thérèse urged Putz also to get in to warm up, and he confessed a superstition about ambulances. “He said to me, ‘Never, Marie-Thérèse, have I gotten in an ambulance. I would only leave it feet first.’”

Engineers arrived at 8:00 P.M. on January 27 and began trying to put up a floating pontoon bridge, working in the dark and freezing cold. German artillery slammed in on them at 10:00 P.M., killing ten and wounding thirty men, and destroying the bridge. Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne ran the wounded men west to the Guémar hospital and returned for more. After their last trip, around 2:30 A.M., they saw Putz rolled up in a tarpaulin and sleeping bag in the snow. From time to time through the night they saw him get up and walk, pacing back and forth, wrapped in his tarpaulin. At first light, Marie-Anne made a hot cup of coffee and took it to him. “The Grussenheim attack depended on him. He had a great responsibility. We figured we’d better keep him in good shape,” Marie-Thérèse said.

On Sunday morning, January 28, the Grussenheim church bell rang, a mournful summons to the torn and lifeless bodies in the snow, to the soldiers in green huddled in icy tanks, to the soldiers in gray hidden behind broken walls. Putz, exhausted and worried, got in the ambulance. He stayed there all morning, covering the passenger-side folding tabletop with his maps and papers, teasing Marie-Thérèse that the ambulance would thereafter serve as a command center. Not another word about his superstition.

A new corps of engineers arrived and tried again to lay a temporary bridge across the river, but it was too well defended. They couldn’t work under the hail of German artillery. Then suddenly, the shelling stopped, and they were able to finish by 10:00 A.M. De Witasse believed the ceasefire was meant to draw them into a trap on the other side of the river. Then the Germans fired a shell at a tank destroyer that had gotten across the river, leaving it crippled and effectively blocking the bridge. At noon, Putz called the company officers together and ordered the attack on Grussenheim for 1:00 P.M. He modified the plan, sending a diversionary group through the southern village of Jebsheim, part of which had been taken the previous day by the Third U.S. Infantry Division. The officers stood in a circle in the snow, conferring amid the bare trees. “I said, Are they nuts? The Germans can see that there’s an officers’ meeting,” Marie-Thérèse said. They were there only ten minutes before a barrage of artillery came crashing down. The men started breaking into different directions, looking for a ditch to roll into, but there was none. Then another mortar smashed into them, killing Putz on the spot and fatally injuring another officer. Putz had fought for the freedom of two nations, and had not lived to see the achievement of either. The bell had tolled, at Grussenheim, for him.

Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Anne loaded up the injured and took them to Guémar. They had to leave Putz because they were not allowed to transport the dead. When they returned to the camp, the need to do something for him coalesced into finding one of his feet that had been blown off. They fixated on the foot. They couldn’t help him and they couldn’t move him, but they could put his body back together. They searched through the snow for a half-hour, and found the foot in a bush. They laid it next to him, said a quiet goodbye, and left.

Marie-Thérèse was later awarded a citation for her work at Grussenheim: “for bravery, calm and magnificent devotion in carrying out numerous evacuations under violent bombardment.”

The attack went on as scheduled, with Commandant Regis Debray stepping in to lead the group. De Witasse took his company to Jebsheim, crossing the Blind further south at the Jebsheim mill, and started up the narrow path to Grussenheim, but confused communications led the attacking companies to retreat. They had to start all over again, through drifting snow and under unrelenting artillery. It was continual firing from both sides, with artillerymen packing snow on the guns to keep them from overheating. By nightfall, however, the French had surrounded the village and pounded it mercilessly into surrender. Flames licked the night sky as the village burned to the ground. In the morning, some 300 Germans who had survived the firestorm were taken prisoner. They said they had been told they would be shot if they retreated back across the Rhine.
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